Things We Must Have, Things I've Seen, and Things I Don't Like

I think we need a dinner bell. (A serious one. Like … one that must be hung or mounted.)

Though … there’s the almost certain risk that kids will wildly clang it when they aren’t supposed to (their own trouble-making version of the thing one is never supposed to do: cry wolf).

But you should have heard me the other day—standing on the front porch, yelling with all my might for Summer (who was by the barn) to come for violin lessons.

It will not do. 

I’ll be without a voice within the month.

We must have a bell!

Of course, what the top priority “must have” is changes from day-to-day. (According to my whim I suppose. Or whether I’m yelling for someone, or wanting a place to sit, or wishing for some privacy.)

We must have a bell!

We must have rugs!

We must have couches in the main area! (Though you’ll see from the attached pictures that we are managing with the two bean bags and two chairs we currently have.)

We must have blinds! (Perhaps at least for the bathroom for heaven’s sake!)

We must have a spice rack!

We must have a lawn!

We must have a towel rod in the master bathroom!

We must have more trees to improve our view in various spots! (Basically, anywhere I can see a house. Hahah.)

We must have a porch swing! (Oh! The porch swing! It’s warming up—well, no, the last three days have been quite cold!—but it will be warming up. And the other night I was surprised to step outside to a full chorus of frogs! [Maybe boreal chorus frogs? Maybe northern leopard frogs? I will report back.] I wasn’t expecting them so soon! I guess because the kids don’t catch them until all the little, new ones start hopping about. But the males get so loud during breeding season that you can hear them even just driving by any of the wetland areas out here. It’s such a delightful sound! Why is it delightful? I don’t actually know. You tell me. But! Maybe that is the #1 priority? A porch swing?)

We shall see what we manage to get first.

In the meantime there are wonderful things to love with or without spice racks and porch swings.

I walked the perimeter of the Pea-Viner property the other day. (Not all of it. Some barbed-wire fences had no gates for me to get through.)

In my walk I came across:

1. Two loudly bugling (bellowing? I don’t even know how to describe it) sandhill cranes. They have the most ridiculous call. Hahaha. They do. I love it. And I think the pair of them must be nesting somewhere about here. I keep seeing them. There even appeared to be some sort of leaping, flapping, mating dance going on outside my front window yesterday.

2. About 8 million red-winged blackbirds. Starlings too. But the red-winged blackbirds are … well they might be what I come to most associate the farm with! There are so many. And I have never gone outside—since living here—and not heard them chattering and calling and singing in a mighty chorus!

3. Cows. (Unsurprisingly.) The property across the canal houses maybe hundreds (?) of them. But it was extra fun on my perimeter walk because there are currently so many little calves running about.

4. Geese. Flying overhead in their V formation—crying as they went. And on my second lap, two of them in our field.

5. And! This wasn’t on my walk, but early the next morning, Jesse, Anders and I watched a fox with an injured paw make his way right past our front-room window. (I went out on the porch to try and get a picture, but he saw me, paused, and then, injured paw a footnote, fled at breakneck speed.)

Mind you!

It isn’t all magic and wonder.

Here are some things I don’t like:

1. Finding a completely smashed chicken egg in my coat pocket.

2. Hearing a lot of loud, clattering noises in my wood stove and trying to pretend I didn’t (in hopes that the sound would just go away), only to discover a poor starling in my stove. ("Birds in wood stove." The second thing I don’t like.)

Penny and I had quite the adventure trying to get it out. In the end our box plan failed us. Bird, and ash, and bird seed were everywhere as we screamed and tried to open doors. At last Penny clamped the box over it against a window and we slowly moved it upward while we opened the window and carefully pulled out the screen.

3. Mud. Mud season. Somewhere in my mind I have a faint, glowing memory/hope of a time with no mud. Or, at least, … less mud? And in theory the kids should wear mud boots every time they step outside. But they do not. And this picture doesn’t do it justice:

The bottom of 1 billion shoes around here, by every door, look just like this right now:

Our cats walk from one porch to the other through our muddy yard and then paw at the windows and doors. And one of them got in the other day and dashed up the stairs and then ran across two bedspreads.

(Cat paw marks on door.)

Pig’s pen (which is actually like an entire field) can’t be stepped in (you know, like in order to feed Pig) without squelching through mud.

4. And we still have six roosters (which is four or five too many).

So, it isn’t all sunshine and roses.

But a lot of it is!

And here, among other things, are a few pictures I’ve taken in our still mostly empty house. (Empty of furnishings. Not people. Thankfully!)

They've been unearthing all kinds of toys that were in storage. (To be honest I really thought I'd used the opportunity of our original move to get rid of all the kinetic sand. Apparently not.)

I'm still hoping for an even longer table!

An after-dinner Sunday walk at Trapper Park. (A lovely place that is forever trying to be closed.)

I have to keep reminding myself not to get so used to a pony or cow wandering past my window that I no longer find it worth noting! I keep reminding my kids too. "Just imagine if a cow had walked past our living room window in Pleasant View! We would have gone crazy!"

Rosie wandering past the porch.

Holly rushing to meet up with her. (They are good little friends--though Rosie is not interested in running and Holly often is.)

Shannon and Lila (Shan's youngest) sent the kids a fun "new house" package. So fun of them!

As I said, making do just fine with beanbags and a few chairs for now. (And we do have couches upstairs.)

Bundles of sleepy elementary kids gathered for scriptures before school. (We are going through the story of Joseph--a chapter a morning. Each time I end it's like a cliff-hanger when we are reading a good book. "One more chapter!" they shout. Haha.)

Anders and Penny inside (as I clean cat paw prints from the windows outside).

We had some carpet left over from the loft, so Mike had it bound into a big rug. It still needs a pad under it, and we might use it here or maybe in our bedroom. Just rolled it out to have a look.

I don't fully approve of all the jumping and window-ledge standing Starling has been up to.

A Post of No Real Rhyme or Reason

Life has been all about moving. But look at the cute Valentine Starling made for her class. She didn't want the little ones the kids always buy to pass out. She wanted to photocopy this for every single kid.

Also, Abe texted about the crowds going to hear President Oaks' BYU devotional recently, and Mike mentioned how well he recalled riding in the bed of various trucks to go hear him speak on his mission in Paraguay years ago. Then, as we were unpacking, the very picture of that moment fell out of an old set of scriptures! (Mike on the left.)

Another delightful thing from Starling. "They all saw a cat!". "The chicks see angel cat. The boy sees a pink flying cat. The ghost saw a ghost cat. The candle saw a small cat. The girl sees a cat that meows when it's hungry. Some girls let the cat come to dinner. The end."

One of our last foggy walks to the bus stop at the rental. (Summer had gone early for orchestra.)

A move hasn't stopped all of the normal things of life from going on and needing done. For example Starling spent several days sick last week. Here she told me she would pretend to be asleep while I took a picture of her.

I've been going through boxes from the storage unit and unearthing various things. This photo of me, Shannon and Megan looking, possibly possessed always makes me laugh. 

Me and my dad and my very favorite sparkly, roller-skate sweatshirt.

Me and my sisters on the front porch of Polk's End during a summer lightning storm shortly before I left for my study abroad in Jerusalem.

Little Abe, Goldie and Daisy. I remember this phase of parenting so well (just me and Mike and our three tiny kids)--though it seems a thousand years ago.

Mike back for a weekend during his six-month training in Georgia:

Handsome Mike on a camping trip we took in the Uintahs several months before Abe was born:

And that's all from this odd little compilation.

Valentine's Day Move In

Very early on the morning of Feb. 14th (Valentine's Day!), after a sleepless and fretting night, and with everyone else in the rental still quietly sleeping, I drove to the Pea Viner house in an Expedition containing most of my kitchen (helpfully boxed up by Goldie only the day before).

It was moving day (perhaps more correctly: "kick-off day to the upcoming two weeks of moving"). 

I'd been full of pent-up anxiousness for most of January as I went through closets, drawers, cupboards and garage shelves; boxed up toys, games and craft supplies (or instructed helpful children [Daisy] to do so), and worked to arrange storage bins in the small, enclosed trailer Mike had purchased. 

That anxiousness had increased as we entered February (the final month in our rental). My mind was constantly making lists of--and eagerly seeking to put check marks next to--all of the things still needing finished at the new house before we could get an occupancy permit. I was forever calculating what things could be boxed up before the last few days; daily guessing how much time we'd end up getting to move everything over; and ceaselessly weighing what things ought to be boxed up (when they might more easily just be carried over in loads from one closet to another ... if only we ended up with enough time to do so).

All of that had reached a bit of a fever pitch as the official day to begin moving dawned. ("What are we doing for Valentine's Day, Mom?" "Doing??? Nothing! We are MOVING! That's what we are doing for Valentine's Day! Moving for crying out loud!") And I'd somehow determined, at that early hour, that the only chance I might have of handling all the moving, and lifting, and organizing, and unpacking, and cleaning ahead ... was to at least have a functioning kitchen in place! (Hence my early-morning load.)

Only, as I turned left off of Young Ward Rd. and up the church road towards the farm, my cluttered mind and stirring stomach began to dissipate in much the same way the thick morning fogs here do. As I pulled into the long drive of our new home to bits of patchy haze lifting and the red-winged blackbirds trilling a loud welcoming, I started to sense the wonder of this moment having truly arrived.

It was on a drizzly fall day over eight years ago (Nov. 2017) that Mike and I drove to Logan with our van full of toddlers, babies and Anders (just picked up from kindergarten) to "just look" at the family land Mike had always dreamt of us living on (and I'd always assumed would stay a faint dream of his). We spotted a rainbow as we entered the valley and the sun broke through the clouds in celestial streaks (you can read about that day here). That day was significant for me because it was the first time that I felt a pull towards this same dream of Mike's--the first time I seriously considered it a possibility. (We even drove past all the schools our kids would attend in all our naivety over how long the process of making this dream a reality would actually take.) 

It was four more years (Oct. 2021) of discussions and figuring with Mike's parents--considering possible ways to make it work fairly, questioning how various county subdividing rules could be surmounted, etc.--before the land was officially ours. 

We found our house plan at that time and prayed and struggled over how to adjust things that weren't quite right about it. (So many times we looked at it and then set it down in frustration, but after a day of fasting and praying, suddenly how to arrange everything right just settled into place ... and, again, I assumed we'd be living up here right away.)

It was two more years (July 2023) of struggling through issues with the county and determining when to sell our house and where to go while we built before we finally actually moved to Logan (the Young Ward rental).

And two and a half years beyond that (Feb. 2026) before we'd ploughed our way through the rest of the hurdles towards a building permit and through the many setbacks involved in our build to finally land us on Valentine's Day 2026--with a house on the Pea Viner land all ready for us to live in!

For a moment I saw that we had been led through wildernesses and oceans and past fiery-flying serpents; that we'd gathered manna and tumbled walls and landed on the shores of our own promised land.

Several years ago, I listened to a talk from the man overseeing the Salt Lake City Temple reconstruction project. He told about one of his many meetings with the first presidency to discuss the progress and President Oaks joking, "If we'd known how hard this was going to be, we might never have started!"

I feel the same about this journey. The amount of money, and obstacles, and frustrations; the major roadblocks, the phone calls, and emails, and meetings; the two moves, the house fix-it projects, the time apart from Mike. Had I known it all on that day in 2017 I would have given up before ever starting! I would have seen no possible way through.

But there was the rainbow on that day. And the sunlight filtering through the clouds. And an undeniable pull. And somehow, step by step, we were lead through all of it.

I felt the bigness of it as I drove to the house three weeks ago to unpack my kitchen supplies into their new cupboards.

And then the window closed a bit and the practical business still ahead fell back on me. Mike joined me before long. Kids woke up. Mike's sister Kimberly and Penny's boyfriend showed up ready to work. Daisy was home. And we started moving: setting up beds and hauling loads of coats and clothes from closets; Mike instructing people how and what to lift and where to take thing; drawers going back into dressers in new bedrooms, etc. Monday was a holiday and Abe and Kenya arrived. Wyatt was working, but Goldie showed up. They moved over holiday decorations and rehomed them in the new storage bins in our garage. Abe and Kenya packed up and brought over all our camping supplies. Mike took Jesse and Anders to the storage unit in Pleasant View where a bunch of Mike's family met them to load up a huge trailer of stuff there. They even came back to Logan and helped us unload.

The next two weeks were spent back and forth between the new home and the rental--trying to bring some order to our living here while bringing back (over and over) what I felt sure had to be "the last load". (A friend recently told me that the last 10% of moving takes as long as the other 90%, and that proved true!) Mike's brother Greg and his wife Rhonda generously sent their nanny to help Penny and I clean the entire rental from top to bottom. Mike went over at nights to fix things we'd broken. And Jesse and Anders--who seemed like little kids when we moved up here--proved indispensable this time around: lifting furniture with Mike, clearing hay out of the barn at the rental, taking apart and building shelves, etc. 

And finally? We are finished with the rental (and barn and garage and well house) and can focus fully on the house here. I wish I'd been taking pictures of us starting to live here these past weeks. But it has been quite a month! So those will come in time. 

But for now, here is what we have:

Me showing Mike the bathroom mirror and shower door that were among some of the last things needing done at the house:

And the wood stove (which was also something we were anxiously waiting on):

Jesse and Anders helping get my garage move-in ready:

(Sadly, the garage now, though hopefully not for long, looks like this):

Setting up the trampoline a few weeks before moving in:

Taking down the big swing set (which somehow Mike brought over on a trailer without taking it apart). Anders worn out from the work and Starling clinging to its upturned legs:

And pictures I grabbed quickly when we arrived with our first load on move-in day (so I could remember it clean and empty one last time):

Multiple kids gathered on our bed during one of the first evenings in the rental. Partly there was no place to sit, and partly nobody is used to not being in constant close proximity:

Dinner from Whitney Boudrero. (Whitney being the one who voluntarily took over food duty for Girls' Camp for me two years in a row in Young Ward.) It was actually really cool. We had a sad thing happen on our second day in the new house. Emily, our pregnant goat, had three little babies--all of them stillborn. It was heartbreaking for the kids and there was lots of crying. But the crying turned to more worry for Emily when it was apparent she was truly struggling to birth the second one at all. After hours of struggle, we said a united prayer that she could please deliver this baby, and within 20 minutes Whitney showed up--with her husband in tow. Josh, her husband, happens to raise sheep. They didn't even know if we'd moved in yet but stopped by just then, and Josh was able to get the poor lifeless baby goat delivered almost immediately. And then, when Whitney saw that we were in the very midst of our move in, she insisted on bringing us dinner the next night--all of us! Married kids included! (And her food is always amazing!)

Our first lighting of the wood stove. (It's wonderful! I didn't realize how much I would love it.):

Our view out front during the snowstorm that arrived shortly after we moved in. (The porta-potty had not yet been picked up and added a lovely touch to our view. ...):

Mike added our pea-vine knobs:

Our best view is straight out front. I keep wondering if we should have angled our huge window that direction. But, the view is a great compensation for having to do dishes!

(The amount of mud we are currently surround by though! Goodness!)

A slightly troublesome aspect of this view? Hans is standing by what, in theory, should become my front flower bed. ...

Eek. You can perhaps see why a basement was out of the question for us. 

But look at the picture my friend Lavinia sent of Hans out by my front flower bed. Hahah.

A mermaid does not seem unlikely at this point.

And a few pictures of our house starting to fill in. (Our front room is woefully void of couches still):

Our table and mismatched chairs. I have dreams of Mike making us an even longer table.

There you go kids. A nice, tiny bench to sit on in that big room. 

And the bookshelf starting to fill in.

The laundry room will be all about function and not at all about aesthetic. Even so, the shelves will, hopefully, become more organized than this! I just kept setting all sorts of miscellany on them as we moved things over to the house. We still need hooks and a shelf and a table for folding laundry in there, but I'm thrilled to have this big room for boot dryers and shoes and snow clothes, etc. I'm especially appreciative of it after living the past 2.5 years with no laundry room at all! (Just a tiny closet.)

The apartment:

And, to end, Daisy's little rental watercolor:

And now, perhaps, I will get out the camera and start capturing pictures of us truly going about living here!